This post might stray a bit from the subject at hand, but allow me to ramble.
I started my adult, finally-have-money-to-fuel-my-stereo-nuttiness with a Technics direct drive turntable bought from a high-pressure guy at a local Pacific Stereo. Not much later I started hanging with a dude who turned me on to the world of Hairy Person and G. Gordon Holt. Smitten by the mags, I bought a Denon 103 spherical tipped moving coil. I played it straight through the standard phono input of my NAD 3020 Integrated, with the volume knob at somewhere around Two O'clock. Yeah, it sounded great but it couldn't track its way out of the proverbial paper bag. Absolutely laughable inner groove distortion. The cure? A Shure V-15 with the brush thing-a-mo-bob hanging off the end. Tracking was glorious but the tone didn't quite cut it.
Meanwhile, my status in the audiophile club was severely compromised by my direct-drive turntables (which was now a Denon), so I blew the bucks on a SOTA Sapphire with an okay-for-now tonearm (what was that brand again? A something MMT?).
I have to say, that the SOTA-based system provided a whole new world in happy listening. By the same token, though, the tonearm's bearing always seemed to be loose, so I traded it in on an Alphason. Yes indeedy, that Alphason improved fidelity all-round. It now supports a Lyra Delos, but I think the Delos might be near the end of its service life. Orchestral string tone is dirty once again. Or is the culprit my rescued-from-the-closet Moon step-up device which replaced my oh-did-I-love-that-thing Mytek Brooklyn Bridge...which recently suffered a particularly ugly death?